Leonid Leytman

Leonid Grigoryevich Leytman was born on 2 August 1931. He attended Moscow School No. 59 and began fencing as a boy, choosing the sabre. He trained with I. I. Manayenko from 1945 to 1950 and then with Vitaly Arkadyev, and in 1954 he graduated from the State Central Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow.

Leytman competed for Dynamo Moscow and was a winner and repeated medallist at the Soviet youth championships. He became a Master of Sport of the USSR in 1955. In 1957 he won a silver medal with the Soviet team in team sabre at the World Championships in Paris.

From 1958 he devoted himself to coaching. In Setun, then a settlement on the western edge of Moscow, he founded the school that became known as the Musketeers of Setun. Between 1958 and 1986 it produced four Masters of Sport of International Class and 74 Masters of Sport of the USSR, and his pupils included the world champion Alexander Nikishin. He was named an Honoured Coach of the USSR and was a referee of international category.

He was also a prolific writer on fencing. He co-wrote Fencing for the Young (1967) and, with Vitaly Arkadyev and A. N. Ponomarev, Stages of a Fencer's Mastery (1975), published many articles on technique in Soviet sports journals, and wrote The Musketeers of Setun about his school.

Leytman was married to Valentina Samokhodkina (1942 to 2019). They had two children, Andrei and Natalya.

The Russian Fencing Federation announced on 7 November 2026, on its website and Telegram channel, that Leonid Leytman had died at the age of 95. The cause of death was not made public. The federation offered its condolences to his family and said that the memory of Leonid Grigoryevich would remain in the hearts of colleagues, pupils and all who valued his work. The news was reported by RIA Novosti, Sport-Express, Argumenty i Fakty and other outlets.

Leytman belonged to the generation of Soviet sabre fencers trained by Vitaly Arkadyev, and he passed that tradition on through nearly three decades of coaching. The Musketeers of Setun became one of the most productive fencing schools in the Soviet Union, and his books on fencing technique were used by coaches and young fencers for decades.